Commercial Zapper — Cbreak

For the advanced TV watcher — here is CBREAK!

It's no longer necessary to be a slave to the TV schedules: at the lowest level of escape there are still VCRs and DVD recorders. There are also megasystems like Tivo and ReplayTV. But if you want to get the same results you can buy a TV tuner card and use its scheduler to record your favorite programs to AVI files on your computer. But along with the shows you record the commercials as well.

Enter CBREAK. It scans the AVI file for certain signature events — such as black frames — which signal a switch from the show to a commercial. These it drops while re-recording the file. Then, at your leisure you can watch the irritation-free results!

There are lots of controls available for this program. Normally, it drops commercials automatically but you can change this to verify each deleted section manually. You can fine-tune the black-frame detection parameters as you wish. There is a setting for the minimum length of segments that will be retained — default is 15 frames, which is about half a second. There is even a "skit mode", so that individual skits in shows like Saturday Night Live and Money Python can be saved as seperate files.

It's a freeware program but the author accepts donations. It's also available for development under the GNU GPL license.

This entry was posted on Monday, May 1st, 2006 at 1:49 pm and is filed under Linux Entertainment. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
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